A Roundup of Winter 2011, and What’s in Store for Spring

We’ve had a busy and exciting year so far, traveling all over the country to present findings from The Measure of America 2010-2011 and forging ahead with researching and writing the California Human Development Report. We made presentations at UNICEF, NYC, the Southern California Grantmakers’ Philanthropy and Public Policy Conference, Los Angeles, and also held a Congressional Briefing for policymakers and staffers on the Hill.

Join us at the launch of The Measure of America 2010-2011: Mapping Risks and Resilience, November 10 in Washington, DC & November 17 in NYC!

California, Here We Come!

With our second national human development report, The Measure of America 2010-2011: Mapping Risks and Resilience, just off to the press, we are now turning full steam ahead to write the human development report for the state of California.

Disparities in Well-Being and the Prospects for Policy

Reaction to our latest report “A Century Apart” has been lively, with pieces in the Wall Street Journal online, the Star Ledger, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as on ABC World News Tonight. Many readers have responded with thought-provoking comments. By far the greatest volume of feedback was generated by David Brooks’ May 4th column, “The Limits of Policy,” which discussed some of the report’s findings in detail and offered his views as to what fuels the gaps between different groups of Americans.

Health Care Reform Passed, Now What?

After a year of vociferous debate, health care reform passed. But the unprecedented attention to Americans’ health somehow managed to miss one of the country’s most alarming health problems: the huge disparities in health outcomes for different population groups.

Healthcare Doesn’t Have to Cost an Arm and a Leg: 29 Reasons for Optimism from Comparisons between Countries and U.S. States

Months of bare-knuckled wrangling over health care reform have given rise to a widespread view that there’s nothing on which Democrats and Republicans can agree. But there is one: politicians on both sides of the aisle agree that health care is far too expensive. And they’re right. Total public and private health spending in 2009 was almost $2.5 trillion. In the next hour, the nation will spend $280 million on our health.

But policy makers and everyday Americans alike have reason to be optimistic that dramatically lower costs are possible.

Rationing Healthcare? We’re Already Doing It

During a meeting this summer between President Obama and governors sympathetic to his healthcare agenda, the President urged them to avoid using the word “rationing.” For many, the word conjures up specters of long waits or limits on individual choice. Others worry it could move medical or life-and-death decisions away from the family. But what is lost in this fear of rationing, and attempts to mute the word, is the fact that we are already rationing.

Stop five men and five women on the street outside an elementary school and ask them the shoe size of their youngest child, or the phone number of that child’s pediatrician. Odds are, the women will know both, the men neither. Much ink is being spilled lately to probe the findings of the University of Pennsylvania study on “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” which found that women today are unhappier than women were in the past – and also less happy than men are. Our research on human development offers a few clues.